Identification with the Complex

Identification with the complex names the moment at which the autonomous-psychic-complex assimilates the ego rather than the ego assimilating the complex. “Their powers of assimilation become especially pronounced, since unconsciousness helps the complex to assimilate even the ego, the result being a momentary and unconscious alteration of personality known as identification with the complex” (Jung 1960, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche).

The phenomenology is exact. The person speaks with a voice not their own — more imperious, more aggrieved, more childish, more righteous — and, having spoken, does not recognize what was said as theirs. The complex has spoken through them. In the Middle Ages, Jung notes elsewhere, the phenomenon was recognized under the name of possession.

Clinically the concept diagnoses a great many non-pathological moments of ordinary life: the quarrel in which one is “not oneself,” the sudden rage that exceeds its occasion, the childish plea issued by an adult mouth. Each is an instance of a complex having momentarily seized the field. animus-possession is a structured sub-case — the ego assimilated by the animus-complex, speaking in the opinions and dicta of a collective masculine voice. The shadow assimilates similarly: one acts out what one refuses to own.

The therapeutic response is not exorcism but differentiation — the re-establishment of ego standpoint through recognition that the speaker was the complex. “Not I, but the complex in me.” This differentiation, repeated across the analytic arc, is constitutive of individuation.

Relationships

• autonomous-psychic-complex
• animus-possession
• persona-identification
• shadow

Primary sources

• jung-structure-dynamics-psyche (Jung 1960)
• jung-psychology-and-alchemy (Jung 1944)